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Sodexho Belgium Vouches for FalconStor

World Leader in Food and Management Services Chooses IPStor Software for Business Continuity and High ...

on 2006-01-26 09:25:21

...in Data Protection and Storage Flexibility

World Leader in Food and Management Services Chooses IPStor Software for Business Continuity and High Availability

BRUSSELS, Belgium--Jan. 25, 2006--FalconStor Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC), a leading developer of network storage software solutions, today announced that Sodexho Service Vouchers & Cards of Belgium has implemented IPStor(R) software for high data availability and data protection. The IPStor solution was implemented by FalconStor channel partner, the COMPAREX Group.

Sodexho Service Vouchers & Cards --part of the Sodexho Group, a global market leader in Food and Management Services and Service Vouchers and Cards, ranks second worldwide, with more than 2,700 employees in 27 countries. The company touts over 293,000 private and public sectors clients and nearly 13 million beneficiaries with a full range of innovative services. Sodexho Belgium distributes and manages a host of services for both the private and public sectors, which range from traditional luncheon vouchers, gift vouchers, sports & culture vouchers, training vouchers, wellness vouchers to internet services for employees at home and incentive services.

More than 120 million vouchers are issued every year in Belgium, and with the emergence of virtual vouchers, Sodexho wanted to make sure its IT infrastructure was efficient enough to guarantee constant data availability and optimal responsiveness, in line with the service expectations of its customers. Storage and high data availability became crucial elements to Sodexho's business operations.

"Customers are expecting to take advantage of their allowance straight away and at any time. A delay of a few hours to restore service following an incident or disaster was considered sufficient in the past, but now the demand is for restoration in a matter of minutes, or even seconds," said Patrick Van Est, IT director at Sodexho. "We were looking for a cost-effective solution with real-time data replication, high availability and rapid recovery to avoid any downtime, and enlisted COMPAREX to overhaul our storage environment. Their recommendation of FalconStor's IPStor solution proved to address all of our IT challenges."

Prior to the storage refurbishment, Sodexho's storage environment at its two locations in Belgium consisted primarily of direct-attached storage. COMPAREX instituted a storage-area network, and deployed IPStor servers configured in an active-active failover mode at Sodexho's primary data center for high availability. The IPStor solution is also providing storage consolidation, aggregation and provisioning, and heterogeneous storage support.

Sodexho is employing near-real-time replication between its two locations, via a non-dedicated optical Fibre connection, using a third of the 100 Mbps bandwidth, with the remainder being used for production. Other considerable business advantages FalconStor brings to Sodexho are under future consideration, which include the data protection of its Oracle and Exchange databases. FalconStor also gives Sodexho storage flexibility, as well as a solution that can grow along with its storage environment.

"Sodexho is the leader in food and management services," said Vincent Pajot, regional director, Southern region, FalconStor. "COMPAREX and FalconStor have delivered the benefits of having an efficient, automated and consolidated storage environment that maximizes ROI on technology investments. This has enabled Sodexho to focus budget and staff resources on further modernizing and improving the quality of the voucher services they provide to their community."

About Sodexho Alliance
Founded in Marseille in 1966 by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Pierre Bellon, Sodexho Alliance is the world's leading provider of food and management services. With more than 313,000 employees on 24,900 sites in 76 countries, Sodexho Alliance reported consolidated sales of 11.5 billion euros for the fiscal year that ended on August 31, 2004. The Sodexho Alliance share has been listed since 1983 on the Euronext Paris Bourse, where its market value totals 4 billion euros. The Sodexho Alliance share has been listed since April 3, 2002, on the New York Stock Exchange.

About Comparex
The core competence of the COMPAREX Group is focused around technologies and solutions for data centre. Having more than 30 years experience in the data centre, COMPAREX has detailed knowledge of the requirements and needs in such environments, especially in terms of flexibility, security and high availability (The Availability Architects). Main elements of the COMPAREX portfolio are build on Infrastructure Solutions, Services and Consultancy.

The COMPAREX Group employs approximately 700 people and has a network of offices and service centres in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and Spain.

For more information, visit www.comparex-group.com .

About FalconStor
FalconStor Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) is a leading developer of innovative network storage software that optimizes the protection and availability of enterprise and SMB data and applications, ensuring nonstop business productivity while simplifying storage and backup management to reduce operational costs. FalconStor's award-winning solutions--IPStor(R) Enterprise Edition, VirtualTape Library, and iSCSI Storage Server--are available from major OEMs, system integrators, and resellers, and are deployed worldwide by governments, educational institutions, and Fortune 1000 enterprises across industries including aerospace, energy production, financial services, healthcare, law, manufacturing, and telecommunications.

FalconStor is headquartered in Melville, NY, with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific regions including Paris, Tokyo and Taiwan. FalconStor is an active member of the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). For more information, visit www.falconstor.com .

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